Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) are essential and integral part of Business continuity planning (BCP). BCP is instrumental in conducting threat analysis, defining impact scenarios and recovery requirement procedures. A business impact analysis (BIA) estimates the effects of any disturbance on one or more business function(s). BIA plays a vital role in differentiating between critical and non-critical business functions and also carries out an assessment. All the business functions or the activities are considered as critical if any change or disturbance in them cause direct an impact on the business and its stakeholders.
Today is the age of Information Technology (IT). Almost all the businesses are IT dependent and have a large amount of important data that can be considered as critical function of the business. This data is not constant but increases with time and the growth of business. Continuous availability of such business critical data and applications is very important for existence and growth of businesses. The health of business critical applications and data is dependent on the health of IT infrastructure components. Healthy IT infrastructure is the proof of healthy business critical applications and data
During disaster situation, to recover vital business critical applications and data, these IT infrastructure components have to be made available at disaster recovery (DR) site with data in good conditions according to Recovery Point Objective (RPO) Service-Level Agreement (SLA). Different vendors according to their product, provide different methods to replicate or recover data at DR site. These methods require highly skilled resources to be available at DR site to execute them and take necessary actions. Also, application has to be developed and run using various IT components such as server, storage components, database, application software, etc. from various vendors and different technologies available. This is the common method followed in business activities as seen in art. Various similar methods are available to recover the site which requires large number of resources and skilled technicians. Moreover most of the disaster recovery systems available presently have maximum human interference and are not fully automated. Business Impact Analysis Systems that are available these days have to be updated time to time and such systems generate reports only once, twice or as customized in a day, but not in real time.
US patent application number US 20040064436 discloses certain aspects of business impact analysis (BIA) in real time in few of its embodiments but fails to explain automated disaster recovery. Also, Indian patent application number 3104/MUM/2010 discloses certain systems and methods involving business impact analysis (BIA) with zero Recovery Point Objective and disaster recovery in few of its embodiments but fails to overcome the distance factor.
The present invention in its various embodiments addresses the above and other possible drawbacks and limitations of the currently used systems and methods relating to the field of Business Impact Analysis and Disaster Recovery.